This doesn't warrant a blog post

I published an article recently about how I set up Tailscale to share files with Producer Steve.

I wrote the article because I finally learned how Tailscale could solve one particular, painful problem I was having: sharing terabytes of files. It's not the most advanced blog post, nor is it the most technical! It's more of a diary or journal. I had a problem, I found a fix, lemme tell you about it.

I took the post to Reddit (my first mistake) and shared it in the Synology subreddit. As predicted, the top commenter was not impressed:

I was prepared for that! Reddit is a tough crowd! Further down the thread we get this gem:

It doesn't warrant a blog post.

It's not worth writing about.

It's not worth sharing.

Nothing could be further from the truth! If you learn something, write it down. Share it. It may seem mundane to you or that everyone already knows it, but that doesn't matter! There are always people behind you in their learning journey.

Your job is to publish your work. Do the best work you can do and hit publish, that's it.

It's not your job to pre-determine that no one will be interested in reading what you've written. The market will tell you that! Some of my best posts and best tweets were the ones that I thought were stupid or that everyone already knew about. I'm a terrible judge of what other people know or will find interesting.

But again, that's not my job.

My job is to put it out there and see what happens. Did it flop? Oh well, did my job. Did it succeed? Awesome, still did my job.

But why write at all? Why share anything?

Jeremy Bowers

jeremybowers

Because maybe some of my problems are also some of your problems.

Maybe some of my problems are also some of your problems. Maybe someone will stumble across this post someday and it will help them. Lord knows I've stumbled across some posts that "didn't warrant a blog post" and been grateful for it.

We need more people sharing, publishing, teaching. Not less.

Almost every professional opportunity I've ever had has come to me because I've had work publicly available for people to find. I never know what might come from publishing something.

But I know what will happen if I don't publish anything: absolutely nothing.